Dead Inside

Karen Mitchell's fourth group of dark attributes

Criminal psychopath “Wayne” after describing the premeditated murder of his brother. He smirks slightly while doing so. Wayne scored 40/40 on the PCL-R.

The fourth and final set of five attributes in Dr. Karen Mitchell’s persistent predatory personality (PPP) model has to do with the inner landscape of such people: “they don’t experience feelings in the same way as others.”

Attribute 16: Without Authentic Emotion; Emotional Responses Are Acted

As noted in the previous set of attributes, when a PPP isn’t playing a role, they present as having no real emotion (“shallow affect”). This seems to be their default state, and study participants repeatedly referred to their “limited, deficient, or nonexistent emotional experience,” often in the context of an “incongruence between events and reactions.”

“The way he spoke was very flat, very monotone, pertaining to how he killed the child, dismembered the child, and eviscerated the child.” (Category 3)¹

The Profoundly Different Inner World of People of DP

This is perhaps the attribute most people find hardest to come to grips with: the idea that another person can be so fundamentally different “on the inside.” We tend to think everyone must be like us, so the idea that they aren’t—and that they aren’t to such a profound degree—strikes us at first as impossible. We don’t even consider it a possibility—until we experience it, at which point it can be quite a shock.

Mitchell makes the following comment:

The data also indicate that people of DP understand from a young age that their emotional responses are different to others and that they do not feel emotions such as fear.

Readers of Ponerology will recognize the idea. Lobaczewski said something similar:

They learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of the existence of other individuals similar to them. They also become conscious of being different from the world of those other people surrounding them. They view us from a certain distance, like a parallel species. Natural human reactions—which often fail to elicit interest from normal people because they are considered self-evident—strike essential psychopaths as strange and therefore interesting, even comical.

Mitchell continues:

People of DP appear to view their absence of feelings as a strength, according to the findings from this study. They believe those who emote are weakened because of experiencing emotions, which further explains the attribute of ego and entitlement.

The data indicate people of DP usually seek to learn how to respond to situations that generally have an emotional impact, and their reactions are therefore practised and enacted rather than innate. They learn how they should respond emotionally by watching and mimicking others’ emotional reactions.

The data indicate some people of DP are better at emulating emotional responses than others. A lack of appropriate emotional response, particularly at times of distress or crisis, is often misinterpreted as intelligence, consideration, sound leadership, or calmness.

Mistaking Emotional Deficit for ‘Calmness’

According to Mitchell this is more common in high-functioning dark personalities (DPs), such as those in business, universities, medicine, law, etc. It is viewed as calmness under pressure, not an inability to feel emotion. As a result, their targets/victims often appear “over-reactive, ‘dramatic’, ‘crazy’ as a result of DP manipulations, humiliations, provocations, and harm.”

Family members, friends, colleagues and others usually view the ‘calmness’ as superior, not realising the serious nature of the tactics being asserted against the victim/target and the extent of false narrative that has been created by the person of DP. … The implication is that people of DP do not experience love for people they are related to or friendly with.

And here’s what Lobaczewski had to say on this:

All researchers into psychopathy underline three qualities primarily with regard to this most typical variety: the absence of a sense of guilt for antisocial actions, the inability to love truly, and the tendency to be garrulous in a way which easily deviates from reality. … Individuals with the psychopathy referred to herein are virtually unfamiliar with the enduring emotions of love for another person, particularly the marriage partner; it constitutes a fairytale from that “other” human world.

Attribute 17: Callous (Without Empathy)

The title of Robert Hare’s famous book on psychopathy is Without Conscience. PPPs lack a “real understanding of or regard for the feelings of others, particularly where these feelings are hurtful and/or painful.” As such, they possess “a willingness to use other people instrumentally for their own ends” (Category 4i).

“They do not care about others so hurting others emotionally, physically, and mentally is a fun little game they play with all their relationships leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. They become more successful in their behaviour over time by learning what has worked in the past and what has gotten them what they want.” (Category 4ii)

Lobaczewki again:

They therefore observe us, deriving conclusions, forming their own different world of concepts. They become experts in our weaknesses and sometimes effect heartless experiments. The suffering and injustice they cause inspire no guilt within them, since these are a direct result of their emotional “otherness” and apply only to “those” people they perceive to be not quite conspecific. A normal person with a natural worldview can neither fully conceive nor properly evaluate the existence of this world of different concepts, or he interprets it through a moralistic lens.

This attribute is not quite the same as the next one, which deals with lack of remorse. “Callousness is about the inability to empathise with others’ experiences, while lack of remorse is about an inability to feel regret about causing harm or disadvantage to others.”

Attribute 18: Unremorseful

PPPs do not experience shame or regret. No matter how big the error in judgment, or the crime they commit, these people are unable to see themselves as in the wrong. It’s just not in their makeup to do so. Lobaczewski calls this “pathological egotism.” They’re always right, in their own minds at least.

Attribute 19: Self-Interested

PPPs were perceived by the participants as only interested in “maximising their own interests.” They are “completely self-serving” (Category 4i). Lobaczewki called this “egoism.” As such, PPPs are perfectly willing to “harm, sacrifice, manipulate, or disadvantage their own children in situations where it benefited themselves.” However, given how manipulative they are, they are able to frame their self-serving actions as being in the interests of others.

Attribute 20: Brazen

This one isn’t mentioned very much in the academic literature, but it’s an expression of all the above. PPPs “behave confidently in situations that would elicit discomfort, shame, and/or embarrassment in people of non-DP.”

“Their brazenness is one of the things that makes them persuasive because they are so brazen about what they say and do that it sounds truthful even when it isn’t.” (Category 3)

“A religious leader was due to marry a couple of his congregation. The night before the wedding he pushed the bride down on her bed and raped her. The next day he officiated at her wedding as if nothing happened.” (Category 4i)

“It is quite remarkable, the things they do in front of other people. Sometimes people cannot believe their eyes. They rationalise what they have observed because it is too hard to believe.” (Category 4iii)

The result is that people who don’t know what they’re dealing with tend to give them the benefit of the doubt, “because it may be too hard to reconcile the facts with the powerfully expressed false narrative.”

The data suggest that even where the most determined people of non-DP might give up on an agenda because they have been exposed as fraudulent or ill meaning, people of DP will keep going.

“They take enormous risks as they genuinely don’t believe they will be caught out.” (Category 3)

“When confronted with contradicting evidence, they will change their story. They provide a new version, without any indication of stress/distress.” (Category 3)

Here’s the full model presented again:

That completes the attributes. Next we’ll look at tactics and differentiators.

1. For reference, Category 1 = personality researchers, Category 2 = behavioral researchers, Category 3 = expert forensic practitioners, Category 4i = non-forensic professional practitioners, Category 4ii = non-forensic corporate practitioners, Category 4iii = non-forensic community practitioners.